On the topic of the Iraqi police, Elizabeth Palmer (CBS News) observes,
"Basic training lasts 45 days. The young recruits are almost done. In
two weeks, they'll be sent into combat. They're called police, but
they're trained like the military." A ton of money -- US tax payer
money -- was already spent training the Iraqi police.

You may remember that the Minister of Interior said in the fall of 2011
that the US should find a better way to spend their money and that
training wasn't needed.

Woah.

You may remember that the man the US press insisted was the Minister of
the Interior said that. He wasn't the Minister. The ministry was
headless. Nouri al-Maliki, thug and prime minister, refused to nominate
anyone to head the security ministries. Instead, he named flunkies
'acting ministers' which -- while unconstitutional -- allowed him to
control the ministries.

So actually, the flunky was speaking on behalf of Nouri.

Now they need help.

One plan being tossed around was basically three sets of forces -- Kurds, Sunnis and Shi'ites -- making up a national guard.

The justification for this was probably best explained by Fareed Zakaria (CNN's Global Public Square), "Billions of dollar poured into it, because it was based on the idea that
there was an Iraq, that there was a nation that there would be a
national army for. Maybe we need a different strategy, which is to stand
up sectarian militias, Shia militias, Sunni militias. They already
exist. And the Kurds have their Peshmerga, that model. Send them into
fight in their areas, not in other areas where they would be regarded as
a foreign army."

Momentum has swung against the proposal to create a national guard that
would encompass local forces in Iraq’s provinces as rival political
blocs expressed reservations over who would be allowed into the new
service and how funding would be allocated.The Obama administration has pushed the national guard proposal as a way
to bring minority Sunnis closer to the Shiite-dominated central
government after years of policies espoused by former Prime Minister
Iraqi
Nouri al-Maliki
that excluded them.

So the police are being rushed through training, the national guard idea
appears dead, Shi'ite militias terrorize Sunnis throughout Iraq. On
those militias, NINA quotes
Kirkuk's Sheikh Othman Agha calling for "a solution to the militias,
which are spread in public roads and highways being contrary to the
Constitution and detrimental to the national interest and harmony among
citizens of one nation."

It's a shame the Minister of Defense and the Minister of Interior aren't addressing these issues and --

Oh, wait, again there is no Minister of Defense and there is no Minister of Interior.

All Iraq News reports
rumors that Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi intends to make new
nominations for the post on Saturday: Khalid al-Ubaidi for Minister of
Defense and the always controversial Ahmed Chalabi for Minister of
Interior.